The Neverwhere
by katieupatree
Summary: The place where love is not as simple a thing as human emotion, but rather it is a living, breathing creature all of its own. Their love. / A post Always story. A little love to see them through to the morning. Pure fluff. T rated to be over conscious.


Hello everyone.

If you are reading this and it seems familiar, that is because it is a re-post of the first Castle story I posted here.  
The ever so slight changes that I wanted to make weren't saving properly, so I decided it was best to just start all over again.

If you didn't come across this last time, I hope that you enjoy..

**Disclaimer: As ever, everything and everyone belongs to their rightful owners. I am simply borrowing them for a little while.**

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**The Neverwhere**

This was it. Four years of waiting. Four years of dancing around each other; loaded conversations filled with enough subtext to fill a thousand novels, and longing glances that lasted just that second too long to be considered mere friendship. And yet here they were, finally where they had been headed for perhaps their whole lives.

The rain still beat steadily against the windows, distorting the pale light of the moon as it shone through the cracks in the curtains that neither had been in any state to notice that night. Soft streams of yellow light flittered across the room, illuminating their secret sanctuary just enough for Castle to study the delicate form of a sleeping Kate Beckett. _Delicate._ Perhaps not something of her that anyone had been allowed to see, at least, not in a very long time. In all honesty, it wasn't something that he had expected to see just yet.

The passion and determination of last night still lingered in the air; still clung to this room, to the bed sheets, to their skin. She'd lead him to this room and never looked back. All burning kisses and uncontrolled emotions. It had been what they needed, no second guessing and no lingering doubts. Hot, and heavy, and desperate.  
But now, now she was so much more. Hair tangled from the rain, and later from his searching hands. Tear tracks still streaked her pale face, a stark mess of dried salt and running mascara. Lips parted ever so slightly in sleep. The crisp, white sheet of his bed pulled haphazardly to her waist; leaving the moonlight free to the dance across the strong expanse of her back. One arm tucked under the pillow, the other spread out across his chest; palm covering perfectly the tingling skin above his heart.  
She was, for lack of a word in the entire English language that could truly do Kate Beckett justice, perfect. Soft lines and deep breathing.

He had always thought that it was the night before that they were waiting for; that singular moment when two people who have been heading towards each other for what felt like their entire lives finally collided. The sparks and the fireworks. The passion. The Roaming hands. But he was wrong. It wasn't that moment; however extraordinary it had been.  
It was this one that he had truly been longing. Because here they were, with nothing but the hope of something beautiful ahead of them.  
It was in this moment that he finally understood what all the great writers of the past had been trying to say; that love, true love, was felt so deeply that it turned into this physical, tangible being. It lived, and it breathed, and it burned through your entire being with such force that all you could do was lay there, let it take you over, and know that the other person was feeling it too.

And so that is what he did. Eyes trained on Kate's softly sleeping form, heart and head so filled with the brilliance of the moment that the world outside the windows could have crumbled around them and he wouldn't have given it a single thought.

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It was not long after Castle had first woken up that Beckett also slipped back into the waking world.  
She wasn't aware of anything at first, and then a dull ache that seemed to drum with the rain as it hit the windows that seemed further away than they should have been. Her whole body was weighted down with the exhaustion of the past twenty-four hours; the lack of sleep, the fear, the bruises of a fight that had taken more strength than she had possessed.  
And then everything began to slowly creep back into her mind; the safe fog of sleep replaced by the truth of remembering. The apartment. The rooftop. The moment of absolute clarity as her finger tips had scraped hopelessly against the skyline. Ryan. Esposito. Gates. Her gun. Her badge. Her resignation that had felt so utterly meaningless. The rain. The swings. A phone sent to voicemail. The fear of not knowing what, if anything, would greet her on the other side of that door.  
_Castle._

And then the world spun once more into real time. The bruises of a man who had marked her for death mingled with those of a man who had marked her with love. A man whose heart was beating almost imperceptibly under her battered fingertips.  
It all came rushing back like the sudden burst of thunder that had rung out as her back had met the cold of a door that she had been so terrified of knocking on. A door that had locked out the world, pressed them together, and promised that all their hiding from one another would be finally over.

Her eyes, stung with tears and heavy with sleep, opened in search of the man belonging to the steady heartbeat below her hand. And they found just that. Richard Castle; the only man capable of writing an entire love story with a single glance in her direction. Bare chest. Ruffled hair. Blue eyes. Eyes that burned into her own with latent passion and something akin to magic. Here they were, after four years of heartache and longing; they were finally where they were always supposed to be.

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They found themselves moved towards each other; neither really conscious of the effort it had taken to pull their aching limbs towards one another. Kate's hand still pressed against his chest; the feather light drum of Castle's heart anchoring her to a world that she might otherwise mistake for a distant dream. Her whole body pulled tight against his; her head tucked to his neck, his arms tight around her slender waist.

It was too late to be considered night time, and yet too early for it to quite be morning. The great in between. _The neverwhere._ That place in which two people are allowed to just exist for a little while; perfectly and irrevocably tied together for their entire lives, and yet knowing that they will eventually have to venture back into the real world. The place where love is not as simple a thing as human emotion, but rather it is a living, breathing creature all of its own. _Their love_.  
Their flawed and impetuous love that had been clawing at their hearts for the past four years was finally here with them, set free, content and curled between two human beings that, at least in that moment, were the only two people in this entire world to have ever existed.  
They didn't need to say _I__ love you, _not right now when it was ostensibly there. Right now, all they had to do was exist. Together.

**End.**

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Sorry for the re-posting, but the spacing was niggling me too much to leave it alone.

Thank you for reading.

Katie


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